Garry Marshall, R.I.P.

He's gone? If you knew Garry Marshall, you probably can't believe it.

He had a boundless and enduring energy that seemed to transcend mortal limitations. Although he probed to be merely flesh and blood after all, the legacy he leaves goes beyond the iconic movie "Pretty Woman," or the classic TV shows, "Happy Days," Mork and Mindy," and "Odd Couple." Garry Marshall was more than a writer, producer and director: He was a mentor and inspiration to young people in whom he recognized talent. Ron Howard was one of many who belonged to this anointed group. As an actor on "Happy Days," he told Garry he wanted to watch him and learn how to be a director. It seemed an unlikely career path for the teenager, but it obviously worked for him.

Dennis Klein, creator of several series, including "The Larry Sanders Show," and my boss on "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," was also a member of Garry's youth brigade.

And, for a time, so was I.

I met Garry after a U.C. Berkeley school friend got a summer job in Tom Pollock and Jake Bloom's law firm. When she saw they dealt with scripts, I got the call to write one. Fast! As if I knew how. But I did it, somehow, and within a few weeks the silly script had gone from Jake Bloom and Tom Pollock, to Chuck Shyer, to Harvey Miller, and finally, to Garry. Incredibly, they all liked it, and Garry asked me to fly down and have lunch with him. He said--in that unique ninety-year-old-tired-New Yorker voice--he had a plan to make me "rich and famous."

"You're so young," was the first thing he said to me when we met at his Paramount office. I could've said the same thing to him. This was no senior citizen. Garry was a youthful, dynamic force of nature. We sat at the bar while waiting for our table. He said I could have whatever I wanted, but he, "only ordered sissy drinks" for himself. Lunch was spaghetti and meatballs which he, being Italian, especially enjoyed. "But," he groaned, "I always get sauce all over my shirt."

His humor was often boyishly self-deprecating and endearing. He called himself the "King of Cute," and in his mind he probably spelled cute with a K. Garry didn't want to dwell in darkness; he preferred happy people, living in a workd that was "kute." If there was no such place, all he had to do was create one.

An actress who starred in a pilot for Garry was fired by studio executives for being "fat." She wasn't, and I complained to him that the firing was unfair. He shook his head sadly and said, "Sweetheart"--everyone was a "sweetheart" to Garry--"Who said life has to be fair?" Then he stroked his chin and paced a little bit. "I get philosophical like that sometimes," he said, feeling embarrassed, no doubt, for having expressed an unpleasant thought.

One day, he and I went to another studio to view a pilot Garry had done with a major producer whose name was known and respected. When Garry introduced me to him, the man recoiled as he barely extended his hand. The pilot was awful. It didn't sell--which was instantly predictable. On the way back to Paramount, I asked Garry what was wrong with the powerhouse producer. I saw he was almost afraid of me. "You'd be afraid, too," he said, "if you had stepped on as many people as he has."

I never liked show business because fairness was not exactly coin of the realm. It bothered Garry, too, in some ways, but he was able--better than almost anyone--to escape into a world of his own design. Now, he can truly rest in peace.

Photo of the Day

Thanks to the Reagan Library's Vatican Exhibit, you don't have to be Catholic to go hand-in-hand with a saint.

Sex, Lies, Violence and Cover-Up at the University of California

Students are protesting again.  They are subdued compared to the brick-throwing, establishment-busting rampages I saw as a student in UC Berkeley, but their complaints against the University of California, which calls into question the prestigious institution's basic humanity, are serious and deserve public attention.  The recent conflicts arose over the University's failure to protect students from sexual predators.

A lawsuit has been filed claiming that administrators did not adequately address accusations of sexual abuse, and also discouraged students from filing complaints.  A UCLA professor who allegedly fondled young women and stuck his tongue in their mouths, was disciplined, but then allowed to continue teaching on campus.

The University's casual attitude toward the safety of female students is disturbing and dangerous, but not unexpected.  The University has been, and continues to be, guilty of much worse.

Victims who have been violated by their teacher, like women to whom Bill Cosby was a mentor before he betrayed them, undoubtedly suffered deep psychological wounds.  But, their lives went on.  They did not suffer permanent physical injuries inflicted by an unknown assailant.  They did not have to wonder why that assailant was never pursued, and why the University of California lied to them and about them; why the University wrote demonstrable falsehoods on hospital records and accounts distributed by the campus police department and administration which covered up the crime.  They did not lose their livelihoods because of their injuries.  They did not have to fight a Goliath like the University of California without benefit of a salary, Workers' Compensation, good health or health insurance.  And, they did not have to live with the burdening fear that someone wanted them dead, and that person, the perpetrator of the attack--not the victim!--was being protected by the authorities.

In a previous post, my niece and I told the story of a UCLA employee who was brutally beaten and raped.  As immigrants, she and her husband were panic-stricken when the University tried to blame him for the attack.  He was still humiliated and terrified weeks later when he heard about the parking lot attack on another UCLA employee, a psychiatric nurse.  He warned the nurse about UCLA's cruel treatment of crime victims, but begged her not to tell anyone what happened to him and his wife.  Their lives had been forever devastated.

Dizziness, headaches, nausea and either insomnia or horrific nightmares began to deplete the nurse's physical and emotional resources, but inhuman abuse, inflicted by the University of California, nearly destroyed her spirit.

The nurse's doctor was pressured to send her back to work.  He refused, telling UCLA that she had been mugged and was lucky to be alive.

She asked the California Nurses' Association for help.  They ignored her.

When it was revealed that campus police had dismissed the attack as "just an injury," the nurse's family hand-delivered a complaint to the Chancellor's office.  Eventually, UCLA conducted a putative internal investigation and a detective interviewed the nurse.  He apologized for the failure to go after the assailant.

A month later, he said, it was unlikely the assailant would ever be caught.  But, the detective promised to post the crime, as the law required.

It wasn't done.  And nothing came of the 'internal investigation," except that the case was submitted to Workers' Comp.

The nurse asked again for assistance from the California Nurses' Association.  Again she was ignored.  Weak, debilitated, and still unable to process her thoughts properly, the psychiatric nurse reluctantly accepted her inability to return to work.  Because of continued harassment, she left the job she had once loved.

The Workers' Comp. investigation dragged on for months, delayed, apparently, by UCLA's refusal to grant access to campus police records.

Then, the University changed providers without informing the nurse.  By the time her family tracked down the new person in charge of the case, they were told it was too late for an investigation because of the looming statute of limitations.

Anxiety, pain, fear, frustration and severe weight loss had now caused a dangerous decline in the nurse's condition.  Still, she was told her only recourse was to file a lawsuit within the next few days.

Again, the California Nurses' Association ignored her pleas for help.

The family filed a lawsuit for her, but asked legislator Sheila Kuehl to intervene with UCLA in order to avoid the legal action for which they were unprepared.  A female staffer curtly told them that UCLA had explained everything already.

How?

In a letter written by a campus police representative and disseminated by the administration.

She sent the nurse a copy.  It was full of obvious lies, including what was to become the University's repeated response to every question:  The University was sorry, but it was unable to determine the cause of the nurse's injuries.

Period.  Case closed.  Then a judge dismissed the nurse's lawsuit when the lawyer for UCLA stated that the delay the nurse asked for would be an unfair financial hardship to the University.

The family wrote letters to Sheila Kuehl's office, to the University, to the CNA, to the Justice Department, to Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, and many others complaining about UCLA's treatment and refuting the many lies in the letter it used to deny the nurse justice.

A typical response came from a female staffer in Dianne Feinstein's office:  "You keep writing as if you expect us to do something."

A ridiculous concept, really, politicians who actually do something for the people.

Years later, when the nurse was in ICU after more than fourteen hours of surgery, she learned of another lie perpetrated against her by UCLA.

A doctor--not the one who treated her--lied on the nurse's medical records, turning an attack which caused a severe concussion with multiple head wounds into "a laceration" from a fall.

Complaints to authorities, including UC President Janet Napolitano, the California Nurses' Association, Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, the Justice Department, even California Attorney General Kamala Harris, were ignored.  At least the outgoing president of UC wrote the usual regrets that the University was unable to determine the cause of the nurse's injuries.

So whatever happened to "women supporting women?"  Where was the California Nurses' Association when it was needed?  Why is there outrage, sympathy, sisterhood, for sexually violated women, but nothing for a woman whose entire life has been destroyed by violence?

Not suggestive enough?  Or what?

In the future, we will print some of the actual correspondence between the nurse and authorities who, instead of being advocates for victims of abuse, became adversaries instead.

Some of us do feel the outrage.

Einstein is Still Not an Einstein

The ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras knew his way around a right triangle and proved it with his Pythagorean Theorem,  which even today, is well known to every student of geometry.  Harder to prove was his notion of the "Music of the Spheres," a theory suggesting that planets harmonize as they orbit in the heavens.  But now, we learn that Apollo astronauts did claim to hear music from the far side of the moon.  While not proof, it is an intriguing suggestion that the old genius was on to something.  The prescient Pythagoras said nothing about what black holes do in space.  Maybe because they hadn't been discovered yet.

That hasn't changed.

But wait a second, you might say.  Didn't scientists just gleefully announce the detection of gravitational waves as two black holes merged?  And that's two black holes, not just one.  Isn't that like double proof that black holes actually exist, and have, in fact, been discovered?  And at a cost of a mere 1.1 billion dollars?

Considering all that scientists achieved, wasn't it worth it to pour over a billion dollars into two black holes?  Especially since no one ever detected even one black hole after over fifty years of searching?

Well, what exactly did scientists achieve?  Did they get exceptionally clear photographs of the heavenly union?  Of course not.  Black holes are invisible, and, in fact, may exist only in the minds of imaginative astro-physicists.

What scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory achieved was, "...ripples in the fabric of space-time called gravitational waves..."

Ripples.  Really?

For over a billion dollars, scientists felt the earth move, but just barely.  And only with their technologically advanced equipment.  Ordinary mortals missed the event entirely.  We have to take the word of scientists for what happened--and, if it happened, we have to take their word for what it meant.

But why did these barely perceptible--and possibly anomalous--ripples matter?

Because matter matters.  And energy.  And because Alfred Einstein matters.  The world of science worships him and refuses to let go, even though his General Theory of Relativity--theory, mind you--has been impossible to prove during about a hundred years of trying.

In Einstein's theory, the Universe is an enormous geometric "fabric" in which time and space are one inseparable entity, existing as in the sphere of the Universe.  All that is, all that ever was, all that ever will be, exists now, and can actually be accessed by scientists.  It is this theory, this hypothesis, this lovely concept that allows advanced and specially-equipped telescopes to supposedly travel back in the space-time continuum to capture the death of stars from billions of years ago.  But what are they capturing?  To call dying stars Supernovas sounds impressive, but, in reality, what is seen is nothing more than flashes of light.  And the dimmer the flash, the farther back in space-time it is.

Or is it?  Infra-red images are colorful, but they are proof only of a camera's ability to capture pictures of light.  Even though some scientists hope to hop on the space-time continuum and travel back twelve billion years to witness the creation of the Universe at the Big Bang, that explosive event remains only a theory which other scientists dispute.

However Einstein's Universe was created, his theory of space-time was problematic.  The hypothesis that matter caused warps, or distortions, in the fabric of the continuum could not be proved.

In the mid-20th century, the scientific community came up with the concept of black holes, which are created, it was theorized, as stars or planets collapse into themselves and disappear from the continuum.  This disappearance, along with the disappearance of its "warp" from the continuum, causes gravitational ripples which travel through the earth.

This "ripple" hypothesis, based on the "black hole" hypothesis, based on the "warp" hypothesis, based on the "space-time continuum" hypothesis is what science spent 1.1. billion dollars to prove.  If every hypothesis was proved, Einstein's theory would appear in a better light.  But none of it was proved.  Einstein's theory remains a theory.  Maybe he wasn't such an Einstein after all.  He certainly wasn't a Pythagoras.